ParenTeen Tip of the Month

Bill MacPhee

"The Nurture Paradox"

There are two extreme parenting style today: lenient/absent and authoritarian/smothering. Both tend toward missing key ingredients in the growing up journey toward arrival in adulthood. The absent parent fails to guide, encourage, and discipline, while smothering parents rob their young of valuable lessons in learning to take responsibility for ones own choices and actions.

Drs. Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen have written Escaping the Endless Adolescence and talk about what they call "the nurture paradox." We love our children but in wanting to be effective in our hurry-culture some of us have subtly shifted our parenting focus onto what we can provide for our children rather than what we expect from them. Parents can easily over-protect, over-manage, and over-control every detail of their child's world. Expecting certain adult-like choices and behaviors from our teenagers is a critical part of shaping not only our view of adolescent capabilities, but also provides an environment where helpful boundaries can be negotiated.

Boundaries and positive discipline expect and facilitate healthy autonomy--the crucial skill of learning to use power responsibly. When we make every decision and rescue our kids from the normal consequences of life we cripple their ability to mature in ways that will support them in the real adult world.

Positive parenting is a delicate dance between leaving our kids on their own and attempting to do their growing up for them. Here are several suggestions for avoiding "the nurture paradox":

• Don't rescue your kids from every difficult task or decision.
• Do guide them through their possible choices for a decision.
• Don't lie in order to cover an adolescent's failure to take responsibility for a choice.
• Do affirm their owning responsibility for their choices.
• Don't always connect your admiration to your child's performance.
• Do provide timely and flexible "scaffolding" that supports them temporarily.
• Don't leave the "scaffolding" up indefinitely.
• Do find creative ways to prove to your adolescent, whom you love, that they have what it takes!

Dr. Bill MacPhee is President of the ParenTeen and Hurt Seminars and has been a pastor with students and their families for thirty years.

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